[postgis-users] How to access PostGIS directly from R (rgdal)

[pcreso at pcreso.com]

Hi,

This may be better suited to the R or GDAL lists, but I don't frequent those, so I'll try here first.

We have PostGIS databases we are looking to use behind a WMS/WFS server & as a generic spatial data repository for my organisation.

We have a lot of R users, & I'd like to be able to have them able to access the topo data (coastlines, roads, rivers, lakes, cities, etc) for use with some of our R mapping functionality.

I had hoped rgdal would support this, but having installed it, it does not support Postgres/PostGIS databases as an OGR source. We could use something like shapefiles as an intermediate format if there is nothing better, but I'm hoping for some pointers in how to enable Postgis access directly.

We can use ODBC, via dbi, etc, but this means reinventing ways of interpreting geometry datatype data.

Does anyone have any suggestions?

Thanks,

   Brent Wood